You're listening to theirmer Show.

Welcome to the Michael Schirmer Show. I'm your host. Michael Schirmer. My guest today is

Peter Ward. His book is The Price of Immortality, the Race to Live Forever.

Peter is a British Business and Technology reporter whose reporting has

taken him across the globe. Reporting from Dubai he covered the energy sector in the

Middle East before earning a degree in business journalism from the famous Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

His writing has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Economist, GQ, BBC Science Focus, and Newsweek.

The subject is of considerable interest to me,

of course, I've written about it.

My first book, Why People Believe Were Things,

I wrote a whole book about it, recently Heavens on Earth.

And so Peter and I discuss religious immortality, the different versions of living forever, that religions have to offer, what it means

to live forever?

I mean, it's one thing to think, well, maybe I can live 200 years, 500 years.

But forever? About 500,000 years, but forever?

About 500,000 years, what would that be like?

I mean, it's inconceivable.

So what does that even mean?

Okay.

We talk about the fact that lies have doubled in length in the last century and why that is, but why things that can't go on forever won't find law.

So there is an upper ceiling, what is that, and how do we break through that upper ceiling?

Upper ceiling appears to be about 115 years.

...